1. Field
Embodiments of the present invention relate to an information apparatus for managing the valid storage area of a storage apparatus associated with the information apparatus.
2. Description of Related Art
In recent years, storage apparatuses such as the HDD (Hard Disk Drive) and the RAID (Redundant Array of Independent Disks), for example, have increased in capacity. A distributed storage apparatus including a plurality of storage units is also available and thus, the storage capacity of storage apparatuses continues to increase (e.g. Japanese Laid-open Patent Publication No. 2005-50303, for example). A recording medium test for storage apparatuses is conducted on all the recording media, e.g., the total storage capacity (areas) of each storage apparatus.
However, the storage capacity of the storage apparatuses such as HDD and RAID, for example, has recently increased to such a degree that a very long time is required to test the entire storage area of storage apparatuses. This results in increased personnel expenditure and equipment cost, thereby leading to increased production cost of the storage apparatuses.
A read/write test, if conducted as a recording medium test for a storage apparatus having the storage capacity of 1 TB, for example, requires about 5 hours. Accordingly, in the shipment test of a product including a large-capacity HDD or RAID, for example, it may be impractical and/or difficult to conduct the recording medium test for all the storage areas thereof.
A conceivable solution to this problem is to test only a part of the products or a part of the entire storage area. To conduct a test only on a part of the products or the storage area, however, is not the most desirable choice, because malfunctions or defects may be missed that effect the quality of the product being shipped.
Even in the case where the product shipment test is conducted over a sufficiently long time to test the quality of the entire storage area, some part of the large-capacity storage area which is probably left unused over a long time is liable to develop a fault, such as a medium malfunction at the time of actual use, for example.